Christmastime Courtship. Marie Ferrarella
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had been working in all three areas for years now and felt she had barely been able to scratch the surface.
Agitated, Miranda looked at the clock on her dashboard. The minutes were flying by.
She was running the risk of being late.
“And if you don’t get there with this cake, Lily is going to think you’ve forgotten all about her, just like her mom did,” Miranda muttered to herself.
Lily’s mother had left the little girl at the shelter when she’d gone to look for work. That was two days ago. No one had heard from the woman since. Miranda was beginning to worry that Gina Hayden, overwhelmed with her circumstances, had bailed out, using the excuse that the little girl was better off at the shelter, without her.
Stepping on the gas, Miranda made a sharp right turn at the next corner, reaching out to hold the cake box on the passenger seat in place.
Focused on getting to the homeless shelter on time, Miranda wasn’t aware of the dancing red and blue lights behind her until she heard the siren, high-pitched, demanding and shrill, slicing through the air. The sound drew her attention to the lights, simultaneously making her stomach drop with a jarring thud.
Oh damn, why today of all days? Miranda silently demanded as, resigned to her fate, she pulled her car over to the right. Even as she did so, something inside her wanted to push her foot down on the accelerator and just take off.
But considering that her newfound nemesis was riding a motorcycle and her car was a fifteen-year-old asthmatic vehicle way past its glory days, a clean getaway was simply not in the cards.
So she pulled over and waited for her inevitable ticket, fervently hoping the whole process was not going to take too long. She was already behind schedule. Miranda didn’t want to disappoint Lily, who had already been disappointed far too often in her short life.
* * *
This wasn’t his usual route. For some unknown reason, the desk sergeant had decided that today, he and Kaminski were going to trade routes.
Sergeant Bailey had made the switch, saying something about “mixing things up and keeping them fresh”—whatever that was supposed to mean, Colin thought, grumbling under his breath.
As far as he was concerned, one route was as good as another. At least here in Bedford the only thing people shot at him were dirty looks, instead of bullets from the muzzles of illegally gotten handguns. He had to admit that patrolling the streets of Bedford was a far cry from patrolling the barrio in Los Angeles, or driving on the roads in Afghanistan. In those situations, a man had to develop eyes in the back of his head to stay alive.
Here in Bedford, those same eyes were in danger of shutting, but from boredom, not a fatal shot.
He supposed, after everything he had been through in the last ten years, a little boredom was welcome—at least for a while.
But he didn’t exactly like the idea of hiding on the far side of the underpass, waiting to issue a ticket to some unsuspecting Bedford resident.
Yet those were the rules of the game here, and for now, he wasn’t about to rock the boat.
First and foremost, he was here because of Aunt Lily. Because he owed her big-time. She had taken him in when no one else would, and to his discredit, he had repaid her by shutting her out and being surly. It wasn’t her fault he had behaved that way; the blame was his.
In his defense—if he could call it that—he hadn’t wanted to risk forming another attachment, only to have to endure the pain that came if and when he lost her. Lost her the way he’d lost everyone else in his life that ever mattered. His mother. Some of the men in his platoon. And Owens, his last partner in LA.
Colin’s method of preventing that sort of pain was to cut himself off from everyone. That way, the pain had no chance of ever taking root, no chance of slicing him off at the knees.
At least that was what he told himself.
Still, he reasoned, playing his own devil’s advocate, if there wasn’t some part of him that cared, that was still capable of forming some sort of an attachment, however minor, would he have uprooted himself the way he had in order to be here because Aunt Lily had asked him to?
He didn’t know.
Or maybe he did, and just didn’t want to admit it to himself.
Either way, it wasn’t something that was going to be resolved today. Today he needed to focus on the small stuff.
Right now he had a speeder to stop, he told himself, coming to life and increasing his own speed.
Because the woman in the old sedan was obviously not looking into her rearview mirror, Colin turned on his siren.
There, that got her attention. At least she wasn’t one of those foolhardy birdbrains who thought they could outrace his motorcycle, Colin observed, as the car began to decrease its speed.
Watching the vehicle slow down and then come to a stop, Colin braced himself for what he knew was about to come. Either the driver was going to turn on the waterworks, attempting to cry her way out of a ticket by appealing to what she hoped was his chivalrous nature, or she was going to be belligerent, demanding to know if he had nothing better to do than to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens by issuing speeding tickets for offenses that were hardly noteworthy, instead of pursuing real criminals.
After parking his motorcycle behind her vehicle, he got off, then took his time walking up to the offending driver. Because the street was a busy one, with three lanes going in each direction, Colin made his way to the passenger side, to avoid getting hit by any passing motorist.
As he approached, he motioned for the driver to roll down her window.
She looked nervous. Well, the woman should have thought about this before she’d started speeding.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked gruffly.
Miranda took a breath before answering. “Because I was speeding.”
A little surprised at the simplicity of her reply, Colin waited for more.
It didn’t come.
The woman wasn’t trying to talk her way out of the ticket she obviously knew was coming. He found that rather unusual. In his experience, people he pulled over in Bedford weren’t normally this calm, or this seemingly polite.
Colin remained on his guard, anticipating a sudden turn on the driver’s part.
“Right,” he said, picking up on her answer. “You were speeding. Any particular reason why?”
He was aware that he was giving her the perfect opportunity to attempt to play on his sympathies, with some sort of a sob story. Such as she’d just gotten a call from the hospital saying her mother or father or some other important person in her life had just had a heart attack, and she was rushing to their side before they died.
He’d heard it all before. The excuses got pretty creative sometimes.
He had to admit that, for some reason, he was mildly curious to hear what this driver had to offer as her excuse.
“There’s this little girl at the homeless shelter. It’s her birthday today and I’m bringing the cake. The party starts in ten minutes and I got off my shift at the hospital later than I anticipated. I work at Children’s Hospital and we had an emergency,” she explained, inserting a sidebar.
“Where at Children’s Hospital?” Colin asked, wondering just how far the woman was going to take this tale she was spinning.
“The oncology ward,” she answered.
He should have seen that one coming. “Really?” he challenged.
Was he asking her for proof? That was simple enough, she thought. Because she’d been in such a rush, she was still wearing her uniform, and she had her hospital badge around her neck.
Holding